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Andrey Zaliznyak
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak (Russian: Андре́й Анато́льевич Зализня́к; 29 April 1935 – 24 December 2017) was a Russian linguist who specialized in historical linguistics, morphology, accentology, and dialectology. He served as the leading researcher on medieval Novgorod birchbark documents and proved the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign. His Grammatical Dictionary of the Russian Language (1977) remains the standard reference for Russian inflection and forms the basis for most Russian language processing algorithms.
Andrey Zaliznyak was born in Moscow on 29 April 1935 to Anatoly Andreyevich Zaliznyak, an engineer, and Tatiana Konstantinovna Krapivina, a chemist. During World War II, the family was in evacuation. There, Andrey joined a German language class, but his teacher called him incapable of learning languages; his mother was advised not to waste time in teaching him German. Instead of repeating phrases after the teacher, Zaliznyak composed a table of German words for six colors. After the war, Zaliznyak was sent to relatives to Pruzhany in Western Belarus; his relatives had a lot of Polish-language books, and he met a priest who knew Latin. He became fascinated by languages and bought multiple grammar books. Several years later, he had a head injury while playing football and spent four days unconscious; bedridden, he spent two weeks with a French grammar book. As a teenager he learned Polish, Latin, English, Italian, and Spanish to a various degree of proficiency.
In 1951 Zaliznyak participated in the first Language and Literature Olympiad organized by the philology department at Moscow State University, where he met his future wife, Yelena Paducheva, for the first time. He took first place, and she took third; in the following year, the two came joint first. Paducheva later became his classmate at MSU.
Zaliznyak began studying linguistics at MSU in 1952, focusing on English and Swedish. In 1956, he was chosen to be sent to France as an exchange student for a year. He had not studied French at university, but learned it by himself. According to Zaliznyak, he was chosen not because of his knowledge of the language, but because there were only women in the French department, and Soviet authorities did not trust women to be sent abroad. He was sent to the Sorbonne, but was advised to go to École Normale Supérieure by his friends Michel Aucouturier and Claude Frioux, two French exchange students he met a year before at MSU. While in France, Zaliznyak tutored French students in Russian. Before France, he had not been interested in Russian, and had never taught. For his tutoring, he composed a ten-thousand-word dictionary and a Russian grammar. With the money he earned, he bought a camera. He attended courses by the Indologist Louis Renou and the Iranist Émile Benveniste, and followed both Michel Lejeune's lectures on Mycenean linguistics and the course of André Martinet, whose book Économie des changements phonétiques ('Economy of Phonetic Changes') he later translated into Russian. His work in Paris led him to conclude that a complete formalized description of Russian morphology was needed.
Back in Moscow, Zaliznyak was admitted to aspirantura and started teaching. He read courses on multiple subjects, including Sanskrit, Vedic hymns, Persian cuneiform, the Arabic and Biblical Hebrew languages, and a seminar on linguistic problems.
In 1958, he graduated from the Department of Romance and Germanic Languages at Moscow State University. His advisor was Vyacheslav Ivanov; in the same year, Ivanov was fired from the university for his support of Boris Pasternak and connections with Roman Jakobson.
[Zaliznyak] never got distracted by trifles, never wrote a single throwaway work, unnecessary paragraph, or unnecessary line. Everything he wrote was a benchmark of quality and served to solve the main problems of life. Hence the titanic productivity, which in recent years not only did not weaken, but on the contrary, increased.
—Alexey Gippius
In 1960, Zaliznyak was invited to the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to Samuil Bernstein's group, and was assigned to study "Slavic–Iranian language contacts". He soon became interested in other topics, but published two papers on it before switching to Russian language studies.
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Andrey Zaliznyak
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak (Russian: Андре́й Анато́льевич Зализня́к; 29 April 1935 – 24 December 2017) was a Russian linguist who specialized in historical linguistics, morphology, accentology, and dialectology. He served as the leading researcher on medieval Novgorod birchbark documents and proved the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign. His Grammatical Dictionary of the Russian Language (1977) remains the standard reference for Russian inflection and forms the basis for most Russian language processing algorithms.
Andrey Zaliznyak was born in Moscow on 29 April 1935 to Anatoly Andreyevich Zaliznyak, an engineer, and Tatiana Konstantinovna Krapivina, a chemist. During World War II, the family was in evacuation. There, Andrey joined a German language class, but his teacher called him incapable of learning languages; his mother was advised not to waste time in teaching him German. Instead of repeating phrases after the teacher, Zaliznyak composed a table of German words for six colors. After the war, Zaliznyak was sent to relatives to Pruzhany in Western Belarus; his relatives had a lot of Polish-language books, and he met a priest who knew Latin. He became fascinated by languages and bought multiple grammar books. Several years later, he had a head injury while playing football and spent four days unconscious; bedridden, he spent two weeks with a French grammar book. As a teenager he learned Polish, Latin, English, Italian, and Spanish to a various degree of proficiency.
In 1951 Zaliznyak participated in the first Language and Literature Olympiad organized by the philology department at Moscow State University, where he met his future wife, Yelena Paducheva, for the first time. He took first place, and she took third; in the following year, the two came joint first. Paducheva later became his classmate at MSU.
Zaliznyak began studying linguistics at MSU in 1952, focusing on English and Swedish. In 1956, he was chosen to be sent to France as an exchange student for a year. He had not studied French at university, but learned it by himself. According to Zaliznyak, he was chosen not because of his knowledge of the language, but because there were only women in the French department, and Soviet authorities did not trust women to be sent abroad. He was sent to the Sorbonne, but was advised to go to École Normale Supérieure by his friends Michel Aucouturier and Claude Frioux, two French exchange students he met a year before at MSU. While in France, Zaliznyak tutored French students in Russian. Before France, he had not been interested in Russian, and had never taught. For his tutoring, he composed a ten-thousand-word dictionary and a Russian grammar. With the money he earned, he bought a camera. He attended courses by the Indologist Louis Renou and the Iranist Émile Benveniste, and followed both Michel Lejeune's lectures on Mycenean linguistics and the course of André Martinet, whose book Économie des changements phonétiques ('Economy of Phonetic Changes') he later translated into Russian. His work in Paris led him to conclude that a complete formalized description of Russian morphology was needed.
Back in Moscow, Zaliznyak was admitted to aspirantura and started teaching. He read courses on multiple subjects, including Sanskrit, Vedic hymns, Persian cuneiform, the Arabic and Biblical Hebrew languages, and a seminar on linguistic problems.
In 1958, he graduated from the Department of Romance and Germanic Languages at Moscow State University. His advisor was Vyacheslav Ivanov; in the same year, Ivanov was fired from the university for his support of Boris Pasternak and connections with Roman Jakobson.
[Zaliznyak] never got distracted by trifles, never wrote a single throwaway work, unnecessary paragraph, or unnecessary line. Everything he wrote was a benchmark of quality and served to solve the main problems of life. Hence the titanic productivity, which in recent years not only did not weaken, but on the contrary, increased.
—Alexey Gippius
In 1960, Zaliznyak was invited to the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to Samuil Bernstein's group, and was assigned to study "Slavic–Iranian language contacts". He soon became interested in other topics, but published two papers on it before switching to Russian language studies.
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